Physics and engineering in a free society: 2. Industry

These days there is a strong coupling between science and technology, between physics and engineering, and we tend to forget that this coupling in our free society is relatively recent. Going back to the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, one finds that science and technology—and today in this room it is physics and engineering—were two independent activities. The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century occurred without the benefit of science. We had in the eighteenth century a metallurgical industry, we had the steam engine, we had other complex (complex for those days) industrial activities, and they had their own independent intellectual dynamics. Science also had its own independent drive, motivation, and creativity. Science—physics—does enter into the picture as we examine the events of the nineteenth century. Watt invented and produced a workable steam engine, but the whole science of thermodynamics—the first law, the second law, the Carnot cycle—became part of our scientific structure much later in the nineteenth century. These scientific concepts then became the basis of further improvement of the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the new sources of power in that century. Thus we see an example where, first, an inventor comes up with a useful concept for industry and where its further development and its further utilization then depend on creative work in science. This role of physics, I think, characterizes the nineteenth century.

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